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I glanced at my pale, exhausted face in the rearview mirror and noted the fear in my eyes which had always been filled with so much life and happiness before. Was I doing the right thing, I wondered? But it didn’t matter if I was or not. I had no choice. Money was running out and I had no one else I could turn to.
Yes I could just find another crappy apartment and some way to scrape together an existence for myself just as I had in Boston, but alone I knew there was little chance of me working out who Soloman was and putting an end to it all. Alone I wasn’t even sure I would be able to continue surviving. I was such a mess. Holding on enough to keep going each day was getting tougher and tougher to do. I couldn’t carry on like this. I needed help. I needed someone to be on my side and tell me I wasn’t alone. I wanted that someone or someone’s to be my family more than anything, but I couldn’t go to them. I couldn’t put them at risk. I didn’t have any other family I knew well enough that I could go to, and even if I did, there was a chance Soloman would know about them.
No, there was only one other person I felt it was safe to go to – Harris. When we were together neither of us had really used social media, so there was no evidence of our relationship online anywhere, and ever since it ended, Harris and I had only ever corresponded by letter. The only reason I knew where he was living the last time he wrote to me, Just before I was taken, was because I had looked it up online at the time, wanting to know where he was, and I remembered the house he was living in, was right near a lake – Gordon Lake. I don’t know why but that name had stuck with me. I knew he was close to Denver too. It wasn’t much to go on, but I was hoping when I got there I’d be able to find the house, and that Harris was still living there and hadn’t moved on. In fact as I drove hour after hour that was my only hope.
I was sure if he was there he would help me. I knew he wouldn’t be the boy I had known. I knew he had been changed by what he had been through during his time overseas, and I knew he had been struggling with PTSD and depression when he last wrote me, but he would still be my Harris, wouldn’t he? That was my hope anyway, because I literally had no one else to turn to and I was struggling more than I ever had before. I just needed to see a friendly face. I just wanted someone I trusted and cared for to put an arm around me and tell me everything would be okay.
Did that make me pathetic? Maybe. Maybe I should be strong enough to stand alone and do what needed to be done. Maybe I would have been before. But now, after those weeks at his hands, I just wasn’t, and I knew it.
I knew I had PTSD too from the three weeks I had been held. The panic attacks and nightmares were a dead giveaway, not to mention my terror at being anywhere where other people were around, and the depression I knew I was drowning in. I had seen enough of what Livy suffered after she came to live with us, to recognize what I was going through myself.
Physically too I was suffering. The cuts, bruises and burns had healed months ago, but I was still weak, and I always felt tired. I had lost so much weight, my reflection now skeletal in comparison to the curves I had there before. I got out of breath so easily now and my joints all ached and some days caused me so much pain I could hardly move.
I just needed somewhere to feel safe enough to rest and breathe easy for a while. I hoped Harris could give me that at least. I was also hoping he’d help me piece together what I knew about Soloman, but if he couldn’t then I would take a small reprieve to just get myself together a little and regroup before I moved on. Hell, a brief hug, or even a pat on the back as he sent me on my way would be more than I’d had in months. Maybe even that would be enough to help me keep on going.
Because I had to keep on going. I couldn’t give up, even as tempting as that sounded some days. I had to fight to survive. That was just who I was, who I was raised to be. I came from a family of fighters, and I wanted to be as strong as I knew they were. I just had to keep going, putting one foot in front of the other. ‘Keep breathing’ – that was what I had kept on telling myself in the weeks Soloman held me and ever since. It was all I could do, even when everything else was beyond my control I just focused on that – on making sure I survived to take the next breath, and then the next. I just needed to keep breathing.
I had been nothing but a number in that hell. Eight. That’s what he called me. I lost myself somewhere in the course of those twenty-one days. I lost everything except the ability to survive – to refuse to give in.
Even since I escaped I hadn’t felt like me either. I barely felt like the shell he had made me into. The truth was, I didn’t know who I was anymore, and more worryingly, I feared I never would. Would I ever feel like ‘Evie’ again? Would the terror of hearing that deep voice calling me ‘Eight,’ ever get out of my head long enough for me to even remember who I used to be?
I just wanted someone to call me ‘Evie’ in a way that was caring. I just wanted someone to touch me and for it not to send terror racing through me. Maybe if they did I could feel just a fraction of the person I once was. I just wanted to know she was still inside of me somewhere – that she hadn’t died in that hell over those twenty-one days.
Could Harris give me any of that? I didn’t know, but I hoped so. Hell, he was my only hope. I had nowhere else it was safe to turn. If he wasn’t there when I finally found the house, or if he turned me away, I had no idea what I was going to do.
***
I woke with a start, sitting up and looking all around me. Where was I? What happened? The sensation of my entire body shaking with violent shivering made me look down and I realised I was on a cold tiled floor, dripping wet in only my underwear.
“No,” I whimpered as I realised exactly where I was. I knew those cracked off-white tiles beneath me. I recognized the mildew scent all around me.
“Are you ready yet, Eight?” that deep voice echoed around the silence of the room and I looked up and saw him in the doorway – Soloman. He was dressed all in black, as always. Black jeans and a black long sleeved t-shirt. The sleeves were to cover the tattoos I assumed he had up both arms. I had glimpsed one arm when I’d been struggling days earlier and ripped his shirt. The tattoos had been all black, white, and grey. A mix of strange symbols and random images. I had committed as much as I could to my memory, determined to escape one day and make sure this monster was caught.
“F-fuck you,” I stuttered through the violent trembling. My body ached from the days of torture I had endured at the hands of this maniac. So many days. I tried to keep count in the beginning, but there are no windows. No clocks. Nothing to tell me when one day ends and another begins. I have no idea how long it’s been. Too long. My body is pleading with me to just give in – to give him what he wants. The pain is too much. How much more can I really stand? And yet my mind refuses to give in. I can survive this. I will. Or I will die stubbornly clinging on, because I refuse to give this psycho piece of shit permission to end me. To kill me, That’s what he wants. That’s why he’s doing all of this. He wants me to beg for death. But I will not do that. My brothers survived years of hell as children. Livy was held by a kidnapper just as depraved as Soloman for years. She was kept underground and repeatedly assaulted and abused and she survived. If they could find a way to fight, then so could I. I had to get back to them. I had to get back to my parents.
“You will give up eventually,” he told me almost casually as he walked into the room and loomed over me. He was huge, towering over me. I had spent time committing as much of his description to my memory as I could. I had his height at around six two. He was built and muscular all over, his thighs like tree trunks and his biceps bulging. He was strong and fit too. I had fought hard in the beginning, using every self-defense move my brothers and dad had ever taught me to try and get away from him when I first woke up in that dark hole, but they were all useless. He was skilled too, definitely trained in martial arts. He quashed every attempt I made every damned time. It didn’t take too long for me to become too weak and injured to fight back anyway, but after a matter of days I’d worked out how pointless it all was.
“Never,” I spat as I glared up at him. His face was covered with a balaclava, as always. I knew from seeing him in the store parking lot that he had thick, short dark hair, but I couldn’t recall any of his features. I hadn’t been paying enough attention at the time. His eyes though – I knew those well. They stared down at me in that moment, dark and threatening. I would never ever forget those eyes.
“We’ll see,” he sneered. It was that note of challenge in his tone, that note of enjoyment he was taking from his efforts to break me that scared me the most. This was a game to him, one I wasn’t sure I could ever win, no matter how hard I fought.
‘You don’t have to win’ I told myself in my head. ‘Just survive. Keep breathing. Keep fighting.’
He grabbed a handful of my dripping wet hair and dragged me across the floor to the side of the old, yellowing tub. It was filled with water. Freezing cold water. I knew because this was round two.
A scream slipped from me as he grabbed my arm and wrenched the weight of my entire body up by it. He grabbed my waist and plunged me down into the freezing cold water violently. I fought my instinct to scream again and instead took in a breath, clamping my mouth shut just before he pushed my head under the water and held me down.
I reached up to scratch at the hand he had around my neck, holding me down to the base of the tub. I clawed at his fingers and hit out at him blindly as I kicked and fought to get up for air, but still he held me under.
Adrenaline filled my body, spurring me to fight harder. My heart was pounding hard, the ‘thud thud’ sound reverberating through my whole body.
Then just when the panic started to leave me and the edges of my vision were dimming, he wrenched my head up out of the water and I gasped in huge lungful’s of air between coughing and gagging up the water I had swallowed.
“Say it!” he yelled in my face. “Beg me. Beg me to kill you and this can all be over!”
I tried to block him out as I concentrated on getting as much oxygen in as I could. My body, still in the freezing cold water, was shaking so badly it made it hard to breathe, but I dragged those breaths in, knowing it wasn’t over yet.
“Say It!” he yelled again, this time louder, his deep voice echoing around the room and sparking even more adrenaline to course through my body.
